Hi.
I have just purchased a Dell XPS 15 Laptop with a single 512gb SSD.
I am wanting to clean install Windows 10 but am unsure whether to place the BIOS in RAID or AHCI?
I have heard the read/write SSD speeds are similar once in windows. Would one of these interfaces perform better boot times? Are there any other advantages?
Any advice would be great.
Chris
I would go with what your notebook came with, unless you have a particular reason like adding a 2nd SSD 512GB and wanting to RAID 0 them? Otherwise leave the BIOS/UEFI alone
It came set up in RAID so maybe I should leave it as that.
The only problem I have noticed in RAID mode is the read speeds more than halve after the notebook has been to sleep. 800mb/s compared to 1700mb/s.
I very rarely use the sleep function so guess its not that much of a problem.
Would boot up times be very similar?
Well it sounds like you have a M.2 PCIe SSD just guessing but Samsung 951? Either NVMe or PCIe SATA our Asus notebooks are coming with the same. However we have no option to change the BIOS/UEFI from Raid mode, so a clean install will require having IRST driver ready to install F6 during the clean install. Speeds don't seem to change much between AHCI and RAID. I would check with the Dell forum for the best procedure to move forward notebooks tend to be proprietary and with this new NVMe standard being implemented specifically with each manufacture
I have a Dell precision 7710 and it was defaulted to RAID. I changed to AHCI (with UEFI and secureboot enabled) and could to a clean install to a Samsung 951 without needing the F6 drivers. I used the MS download tool to create a USB boot drive. If bios is set to RAID, you would need the F6 drivers.
The advantage of using AHCI is you can use the Samsung NVMe driver for the 951. If the bios is set to RAID, you cannot use the Samsung Driver and use the MS default or the IRST drivers.
If you already installed under RAID, you can change to AHCI with Win 10. In Win 10, set to do a safemode boot (run => msconfi => boot => safe boot). On the reboot, hit F2 and go into bios and change to AHCI. this will boot into safemode and load the default MS drivers. go back to MS config and change to normal boot, then reboot. Then install the Samsung NVMe driver. If you just change in the bios and do not go into Safemode, you will get a blue screen on boot.
Mike
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